Designing a RISC-V CPU, Part 1: Learning hardware design as a software engineer

Tue 16 February 2021

I have no experience in digital logic design. That is, I didn’t until I recently decided that I would like to try designing my own CPU and running it on an FPGA! If you too are a software engineer with a vague interest in hardware design, I hope this series of posts about what I’ve learnt will be helpful and interesting. In this first installment, I hope to answer these questions:

• What is digital logic design?
• How do I get started, and what tools might I use?

In future installments, I will go into more detail about my CPU design and the RISC-V architecture, as well as hopefully answering these questions:

• What about digital logic design is fundamentally different from software design?
• What about digital logic design is similar to software design?

You can see the code for my CPU at the time of writing hereor an up to date version here.

https://mcla.ug/blog/risc-v-cpu-part-1.html

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